I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan. I’m an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. I have since written about music, media, and culture for everything from books and blogs to national magazines and academic journals. My books include Dead Precedents (Repeater Books), Boogie Down Predictions (Strange Attractor Press), and the forthcoming The Medium Picture (UGA Press) and Post-Self (Repeater Books). I hold a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and currently teach in the School of Communication at the University of North Florida.
Further Background:
After over ten years of making photo-copied zines, I registered the domain name frontwheeldrive.com in 1997. A few false starts later, it evolved into an archive of interviews and reviews that explored the peaks of theory and technology and the depths of the cultural underground. Following our interests and curiosity wherever they led, my small but dedicated staff and I kept the site up-to-date with in-depth reviews of books, films, music, and art from all the edges of culture — and interviews with the minds that created them. Though frontwheeldrive.com ceased operations in late 2007, I collected the best of its interviews in my first anthology, Follow for Now. Most of my writing since remains archived right here on this site.
For 20 years (2003-2022) I bugged my literary-minded friends and colleagues about their most anticipated or most beloved summer reads and compiled those lists into the annual Summer Reading List. Contributors included Dominic Pettman, Dave Allen, Lance Strate, Ian MacKaye, Richard Kadrey, Paul Tremblay, John Oakes, Tia Ja’nae, Danika Stegeman LeMay, David Leo Rice, Autumn Christian, Howard Bloom, Erik Steinskog, Peter Relic, Alex Burns, Alice Marwick, André Carrington, Patrick Barber, Lily Brewer, Alfie Bown, Charles Mudede, Brian Tunney, Gerfried Ambrosch, Jussi Parikka, Paul Levinson, Steve Jones, Peter Lunenfeld, Mark Bould, Matthew Gold, Rita Raley, M. Sayyid, Gary Suarez, Pat Cadigan, Emily Empel, Alexander Weheliye, André Carrington, Christina Henry, Alfie Bown, Charles Mudede, Joseph Nechvatal, Rick Moody, Steven Shaviro, David Weinberger, Mark Dery, Douglas Rushkoff, James Gleick, Ashley Crawford, Phil Agre, Marc Pesce, Shepard Fairey, Erik Davis, Zizi Papacharissi, Howard Rheingold, McKenzie Wark, Paul Saffo, Tricia Wang, Mark Amerika, Nick Harkaway, and many, many others.